Each map is a visual guide to where a particular bird species may find the climate conditions it needs to survive in the future. We call this the bird’s “climatic range.”
The colors indicate the season in which the bird may find suitable conditions— blue for winter, yellow for summer (breeding), and green for where they overlap (indicating their presence year-round).
The darker the shaded area, the more likely it is the bird species will find suitable climate conditions to survive there.
The outline of the approximate current range for each season remains fixed in each frame, allowing you to compare how the range will expand, contract, or shift in the future.
The first frame of the animation shows where the bird can find a suitable climate today (based on data from 2000). The next three frames predict where this bird’s suitable climate may shift in the future—one frame each for 2020, 2050, and 2080.
You can play or pause the animation with the orange button in the lower left, or select an individual frame to study by clicking on its year.
The Mourning Warbler may be better able than most to cope with a northward shift in range. It is highly migratory, and its preferred breeding habitat is dense second growth, which appears relatively quickly. This is all good news in light of Audubon’s climate model projection that the species may lose 96 percent of its current summer range by 2080, with a limited chance of expansion. If the birds are unable to quickly adapt to a new summer range, they will be in serious trouble as a species. Mourning Warblers spend the winter in southern Central America and northwestern South America, so the model makes no winter predictions.
Explore more birds threatened by climate change around the country.
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